Negotiating the slippery slope of nonfiction

BEFORE Michael Moore, before reality TV, documentary was a high-minded genre that aimed to educate, not entertain.

But today, when a quiet little film about Antarctic birds can pull in more than $125 million worldwide, documentaries have proven they can appeal to the masses, competing for box-office dollars right alongside Hollywood blockbusters. Entering that arena creates a new dilemma for ambitious documentary filmmakers. On the one hand, they want a theatrical release, because that’s the tried-and-true path to a broad audience and a high-profile career. On the other, if they stray too far from real life, they risk losing the social and cultural caché of a documentary. A feature film telling the same story just doesn’t pack the same wallop.

That’s led to the rise of hybrid films that regard documentary as an art form that sculpts the facts and isn’t bound by them. Cleverly scripted and staged scenes are used to amp up plots. Actors portray non-actors. Film stock is distressed to pass for archival footage. And real life merges so seamlessly with dramatization, and often social activism, that it’s not always clear what’s fact and what’s fiction.

This sleight of hand doesn’t always bother an audience, especially if its members share the filmmaker’s point of view. After all, so-called objective truth -- if there is such a thing -- doesn’t play so well on the big screen. (That is, unless it’s Al Gore using pie charts and graphs.) Still, audiences don’t like to feel duped.

All this leaves documentary filmmakers stuck on the question of disclosure and the true definition of “documentary.” What exactly do they owe the audience, anyway? When do they know they’ve entered feature film territory?

“It’s something that we struggle with continuously,” said filmmaker Stacy Peralta, whose documentaries include “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” the 2001 skateboarding film. “You are representing what’s supposed to be a truth, [but] if we make films that don’t make it to the theater, then they end up on PBS. We have to devise ways to make the films dynamic -- as interesting as fiction.”

“Documentary” has increasingly become an umbrella term as filmmakers move away from the naturalistic or observational techniques of the cinéma vérité movement. The sub-genres -- including “nonfiction film” and “mockumentary,” “fable” and “faux-doc” -- are as varied as filmmakers themselves.

Viewers are rarely privy to these distinctions. For example, it’s not widely known that scores of birds in 2003’s Oscar-nominated “Winged Migration” were raised in captivity and trained to fly with the crew’s ultralight aircraft. The film was still called a documentary.

“Radiant City,” the 2006 Canadian film about urban sprawl, is set up like a documentary with scenes from the life of a Calgary family interspersed with interviews with academics. But actors were placed in real suburban families and deliver lines from a script that features stories from their own lives. Much of the film is staged as a way of “underlining the un-reality” of suburban life, said Jim Brown, who directed the film with Gary Burns.

Though they drop clues to their ruse, Brown said viewers are generally unaware of their tricks until the actors reveal themselves.

“All documentaries are fake to some extent,” said Brown, a Canadian radio host who has worked in print and TV journalism. “A [purist] Maysles brothers film still has a three-act structure. It still has a climax. They build to some kind of huge thing at the end. They’re all manipulative to some degree.”

Audiences of all kinds crave authenticity, and the desire to satisfy that hunger in splashy, dramatic ways has helped warp the line between truth and fiction to the point that the scandals are hardly shocking anymore. There was James Frey and his 2003 faux-memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” Not to mention those three crazy years that Jayson Blair published faux-news in the New York Times.

Filmmakers, meanwhile, have answered the demand for heightened reality with a flood of documentaries, driven by accessible technology, a polarized political climate and the promise of fortune planted by those rare blockbusters. The market is saturated with docs, YouTube clips and camera phone videos motivating filmmakers to find creative ways to break through the clutter.

In this context, merging documentary and feature film seems like an almost evolutionary step.

It’s one of the reasons why Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 feature film “The Road to Guantanamo,” a dramatized version of the true story of three British men who were captured by U.S. forces, won documentary awards in Britain and the U.S.

It’s also the source of the skepticism surrounding “Billy the Kid,” about the small-town coming of age of a disabled teenager. In the film, Billy Price meets a girl, falls in love and loses her in a matter of four days -- a neat dramatic arc some viewers suspected was set up. Before Sean Farnel, the programmer for the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, agreed to screen it, he quizzed director Jennifer Venditti until he was convinced the film was authentic.

“There’s a lot of new ideas about what documentary is and what it means,” said Farnel. “And a lot of the rules that have been set are now being broken. The core of it gets down to the responsibility of the filmmaker to represent events as she or he experiences them. Within that, there’s quite a bit of play -- as long as, overall, you’ve told a story how you’ve experienced it.”

Documentary director Matt Ogens feels strongly about truth in documentary filmmaking. But in his film “Confessions of a Superhero” -- a profile of actors who work for tips as comic book characters on Hollywood Boulevard -- Ogens brought in a psychotherapist to work with his subjects and shot the sessions. He doesn’t inform the viewer of his role.

“Was it staged?” Ogens said in an e-mail. “Well, it was discussed and brainstormed with the characters, and they liked the idea. I wanted to come up with an alternative way of interviewing them and see what an objective point of view would reveal. Turns out it revealed a lot. . . . I felt it worked well with the story and definitely fits the title of the film.”

But Ogens didn’t like the idea of putting words in a subject’s mouth. “That’s the filmmaker’s thought and is a bit manipulative,” he wrote.

Werner Herzog had no such qualms when making his 1997 doc, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” which profiles Dieter Dengler decades after he’s rescued from a Laotian prison camp. In the film, Dieter’s home had several paintings of open doors.

“He says to me, ‘It denotes freedom that I’m able to open and close doors,’ ” Herzog explained during a November 2005 discussion on reenactments hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

So Herzog staged a scene in which Dieter compulsively opens and closes the door to his home. When Dieter worried aloud that his friends would think he was disturbed, Herzog replied, “This is quintessentially you, even if you do not do it in private. From that moment on, we as an audience will be with you.”

It’s not the first time

There is a long history of ambiguity in documentary film. Documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty staged and scripted scenes depicting Eskimo life in arctic Canada in his 1922 film, “Nanook of the North.”

“None of the guys in the 1930s had much trouble with scripting events,” said Bruce Davis, the academy’s executive director. “After cinéma vérité, it became bad form to affect the event that you were reporting on.”

Albert Maysles and his brother, David, are known for their purist form in films such as “Salesman,” the 1968 profile of door-to-door Bible salesmen. Albert Maysles maintains that a true documentary is shot with no manipulation. “The audience has the right to expect that if it’s a documentary, it’s totally factually direct,” he said. “If the line is blurred between fact and fiction, I think there should be some message to the viewer that has been done.”

The academy took on the issue after questions were raised about scripting, staging and reenactment in three recent documentaries: “The Story of the Weeping Camel,” about a camel that rejects its calf; “Touching the Void,” the tale of two mountain climbers; and “Mighty Times: The Children’s March,” about historic civil rights demonstrations.

“Mighty Times” won an Oscar in 2005 for best short documentary, setting off controversy over filmmakers Bobby Houston and Robert Hudson’s use of reenactments crafted to look like archival footage of the 1963 civil rights action. Not all viewers could detect the dramatization.

After some debate, the academy amended its Oscar submission requirements. Now filmmakers must detail their methods, including reenactments, scripted sequences, and use of actors, stop-motion photography, computer imagery and specially trained or bred animals.

In the end, the disclosure form was a way to “defend the existing categories” of film, Davis said. No one wants to inadvertently nominate a feature film for a documentary Oscar. But that line is transient and the academy’s documentary branch members -- like the viewing public -- are just trying to keep up.

“When you start any discussion on documentary,” said Davis, “everybody gets to that and stumbles.”

gina.piccalo@latimes.com